by Peter Rees
Posted to Bairnsdale, Victoria, in 1942, Rollo helped train Hudson and Beaufort crews, some of whom were sent to reinforce the RAAF squadron at Milne Bay, New Guinea. Training flights south over Bass Strait often went past Flinders Island, and the new squadron leader thought it a waste for the crews not to land and collect lobsters for the officers’ mess. Sam Balmer wanted Rollo to join him in New Guinea, but the RAAF had other ideas. He was to be posted to England. That meant leaving Grace and their daughter, Sue, behind, with no idea when they would see each other again.
After three months of initial RAAF training, Noel Eliot was sent to No. 9 Elementary Flying Training School, Cunderdin, where he took to the air for the first time, flying a Tiger Moth.
When not trying to fly the beastly little things, we seemed to spend the rest of our time digging trenches and filling sandbags. The Japs had just started bombing northern Australia at that time and we had all the experts telling us how to dig trenches. First of all we dug them in a straight line, then another expert said that was no good, fill them in and dig them in a zig-zag. The weather was hot and the ground was hard. However, the [Warrant Officer Disciplinary] was a great help—he used to come around with a bottle of methylated spirits to put on our blistered hands.
Completing his training at the Service Flying Training School, Geraldton, on twin-engined Ansons, Noel was duly presented with his ‘wings’. He was posted to Sydney with his brother Bill, who had been finishing his navigator training. There he met a young woman who worked at the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Enid Stumbles. They began writing to each other.
Ted Pickerd finally went into uniform on 5 December 1941. ‘The moment I joined the Air Force I was in a different world,’ he recalled. ‘There was a different outlook. I was categorised as a navigator—much to my disappointment at the time, because I wanted to be a fighter pilot and wear my cap at a jaunty angle like the fighter pilots did.’
Ted was not alone in his desire to be a pilot. Most aircrew trainees entered the RAAF with the same ambition, but only one in five would progress to pilot training. Ted believed that those who were chosen to become navigators had certain personality traits in common: ‘Time proved that they paid a lot of attention to detail, they had patience, and in the main, I think, we were probably a year or two older than the average in the course. I think that might have had a bearing on it.’
Ted took to navigator training like a bird to flight—well, almost. At Mt Gambier, in South Australia, the home of No. 2 Air Observers School, he trained on outdated Avro Anson aircraft. The training had its ups and downs. Ted had no problem studying the elements of navigation on the ground, but applying them in the air soon earned him the nickname ‘Perko Pickerd’. ‘I was violently airsick all though my training in Australia, airsick for the first hundred hours. It cost me a beret every two flights because the paper bags they used to give us were not too satisfactory.’
He was then posted to No. 2 Bombing and Gunnery School at Port Pirie for further training. Despite his discomfort with guns, Ted just had to deal with it. Along with other trainees, he flew in notorious ‘smelly old Fairey Battle’ training aircraft, British single-engine light bombers built in the late 1930s for the RAF. Weighed down with a three-man crew and a bomb load, they were already obsolete by the start of the war and made easy pickings for the enemy. Such were their losses in France that they were withdrawn from combat service and relegated to training units.
From Port Pirie, Ted was transferred to Nhill, in the Victorian Wimmera, and No. 2 Air Navigation School for celestial and astronavigation courses. This is where his ‘good fortune really started’. Ted was one of six out of about ninety trainees who were commissioned off-course. He went straight from leading aircraftman (LAC) to pilot officer. He had never been into the officers’ mess before. ‘There were no officers’ uniforms, so I took the propellers off my sleeve and put the pilot officer’s strips on.’ In November 1941, three weeks after his training finished, Ted sailed for the United States. In the week before he embarked he became engaged. But marriage would have to wait until he returned from the war. He was not going to commit the same misdeed as his brother Bill.
Alick Roberts also wanted to be a pilot when he began training. The categorisation process started early, with regular interviews and assessments, one of the last of which was a stanine test, scored on a U.S. Air Force–devised ‘standard nine-point’ scale. For Alick’s test, a large white screen was erected on one side of a small parade ground. On the other side sat a chair in front of which were a control stick and a rudder bar. An operator to one side projected a spotlight onto the screen and moved it in sudden, darting movements here and there. The trainee sat in the chair and, using the stick for vertical movement and the rudder bar for lateral movement, was required to follow the spot with a cross of light. Alick recalled:
It was not until I was about to take my seat in the chair that I was informed that the aircraft rudder bar operated in exactly the opposite way to what I expected: right foot forward to turn right and left foot forward to turn left. Logical, of course, [since] the control cables went straight back to either side of the rudder; they did not cross over. Had I been allowed a few minutes to consider this information and mentally condition myself I think I would have coped, but I was not allowed that luxury. I was fine with my vertical movements but laterally I tended first to go the opposite way. I blew it!
After eight weeks of training, Alick was designated an air observer trainee. After the final examinations, he was reclassified as leading aircraftman aircrew.
An aspect of the training that surprised him was what he came to later see as psychological conditioning for what lay ahead. This involved the constant repetition, with heavy emphasis, of the words ‘YOU ARE EXPENDABLE!’ ‘Many of our early drill instructors bawled out these words with malice and with relish,’ Alick said.
Posted to No. 1 Air Observers School in Cootamundra, southwestern New South Wales, Alick made his first flights and undertook navigation training. There were no parachutes for trainees or staff aircrew: matériel shortages were too great. After completing the bombing and gunnery course at West Sale, Gippsland, Alick was posted to No. 1 Air Navigation School at Parkes in readiness to leave Australia.
It was inevitable in wartime Australia that anyone with the surname Ward would be nicknamed Eddie, after Labor’s fiery orator Eddie Ward, the Minister for Labour and National Service in the Curtin government. It happened to nineteen-year-old Francis John Ward when he enlisted in the RAAF in December 1942. He would be known as Eddie for the rest of his life. At home in Adelaide, Eddie had been a telegraph boy and later a postman: ‘I was delivering [mail] from the boys in the Middle East, and all the young wives and girlfriends would be hanging over the fence waiting for the postie. I used to get cups of tea and fresh scones, and all sorts of things.’
Posted to Bradfield Park, Sydney, for training, Eddie immediately noticed an unusual taste in the tea. He thought it was bromide salts, which many recruits falsely believed was used to repress their sex drive. ‘You could taste the flamin’ bromide in your tea. Oh, they really whacked it in. That kept the boys quiet,’ Eddie said. But if there was any loss of libido among Eddie’s comrades, it was the result of fatigue and the rigours of training. It certainly bounced back fast when they got to England.
2
THE SHORT-ARM PARADE
Sailing on a French luxury liner was something Ted Pickerd had never expected. This one had a Parisian-style pavement cafe and a grand first-class entrance hall and dining room, all Art Deco style. The British had seized the Île de France when it was tied up at a New York pier after the fall of France in June 1941 and turned the vessel into a troopship.
Unlike many of the troopships of the day, the Île de France was far from crowded when it left Hobart for the United States west coast. Ted was one of only about 130 Australians enjoying the grandeur of the great ocean liner. They reached Pearl Harbor in Hawaii not long after the Japanese attack on
7 December 1941, which sank four battleships, damaged another four and killed more than 2400 Americans. As Ted surveyed the devastation from the deck of the Île de France, the USS Arizona was ‘still smouldering in its grave’. This first glimpse of the war shocked him.
At San Francisco, the Australians boarded a cross-continental train for the large military base of Fort Indiantown Gap, in Pennsylvania. It was at the Gap that Ted discovered the US military did things differently. A colonel in the US Army wore a silver eagle as his rank insignia and was known as a ‘bird colonel’ to distinguish him from a lieutenant colonel, who wore an oak leaf. ‘We too wore an eagle on our sleeve, but we were about the lowest form of animal life in the officer ranks,’ Ted recalled. Ted and some mates were shown around the Capitol building in Washington. ‘Walking up the steps there were American soldiers on guard and every time I walked past I got a “Present arms”. I couldn’t understand it until somebody said to me, “They think you are a bird colonel,” which was about six ranks above me.’ Ted enjoyed the ‘promotion’ while he could.
There was enjoyment on various levels for these young Australians in North America. A new world was unfolding before them. With the prospect of war ahead of them, and necessary training to be completed before crossing the Atlantic to England, this interlude presented opportunities and challenges.
After completing his gunnery training, Geoff Williams prepared to join the largest consignment of fully trained aircrew to leave Australia. The USS West Point secretly left the port of Melbourne in complete blackout en route for San Francisco. From there, they headed for Camp Myles Standish in Massachusetts, a receiving camp for personnel from Australia, Poland, Canada and New Zealand.
On leave in Boston, Geoff and a mate booked into the swish Manger Hotel. Arriving in late morning, they thought it time for a drink. In the cocktail bar, a young woman asked Geoff if he was Australian and staying at the hotel. ‘Yes,’ he said, and she asked for his room number. ‘Half an hour later, whilst unpacking my gear in my room, she knocked on the door. She walked over, kissed me, took off her fur coat and stood there naked! I was astonished. Like thousands of other virgin soldiers far from home, it was the first time I’d experienced such an encounter. I don’t think I would have been too satisfactory a partner.’
So fascinated were Bostonians with the Australians that some were interviewed on local radio. With tongue in cheek, they spoke about kangaroos hopping through central Melbourne and Sydney. ‘All the bullshit imaginable went over the air and the poor American people didn’t have a clue.’ Despite that, Geoff believed the war created a tremendous sympathy between the two countries. ‘We emphasised that we were Australian and not English. In the early days of the war [Englishmen] would walk into a bar and wouldn’t be served. But when the bartender knew an airman was Australian he would often be shouted free drinks.’ Their welcome soon wore thin, however. ‘The Australians were picking up the local girls and being invited to their homes and the Yankee boys didn’t like that at all. There were often fights in the cafes, particularly when the US Army boys were on leave.’
Also on the USS West Point was twenty-year-old John Holden, who had been intent on joining the Air Force since the late 1930s, when he began to believe war was inevitable. On arrival in San Francisco, he found Americans perplexed:
They couldn’t understand why we were leaving Australia while they were sending their troops out to Australia. It was, ‘Where’re you going?’ And we said, ‘We think we’re going to [the] United Kingdom.’ ‘What for? Why aren’t you staying in Australia? We’re sending our boys out to Australia!’ So it’s just one of those things that you couldn’t really find an answer for.
Alick Roberts left Australia in mid-July 1943 for Halifax, in Canada. While he and his mates waited for a ship to take them to England, a group of them discovered the living quarters of Canadian Women’s Auxiliary Air Force members, which were out of bounds to male personnel. The Canadian women entertained the Australians over coffee and biscuits in the WAAF common room, only to run foul of a senior officer doing the rounds. Names were taken, and next morning on parade an announcement was made: ‘The following Royal Australian Air Force personnel will report to the Mike Shack immediately after the parade—Sergeants Bradman, D; Calwell, A; Curtin, J; Menzies, R; Casey, R; Chifley, B; Kingsford Smith, C; Evatt, H.’
Australian airmen who passed through New York had an unexpected opportunity to record gramophone messages to be broadcast on ABC radio in Australia. This was organised by Nola Luxford, a New Zealand actress who became a Hollywood film star in the 1920s and ’30s, and was the New York manager for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Nola also helped set up the Boomerang Club to welcome, entertain and assist Australian and New Zealand servicemen.
Alf Read, who came from pioneering stock in Parkes, was among those who benefited from Luxford’s largesse. After their arrival, she arranged for twenty-year-old Alf and a mate to enjoy New York from a novel perspective. The pair were put under the wing of the editor of Mademoiselle magazine. ‘We stayed with her at Park Avenue and [were] seen in all the right places,’ Alf recalled. The first news Alf’s new wife received about him was a series of glossy photographs in the magazine of him at a fashion parade in New York. Alf was forced to explain all in a letter that took some weeks to arrive in Australia.
Differences in military protocol bedevilled the Australians in both the United States and Canada. Twenty-year-old pilot Don Huxtable and his mates came up with their own solution to this after they arrived at an Air Force base in Edmonton in early 1943. They quickly ran foul of the rule in Canada to salute when passing the Canadian flag. ‘Then one morning,’ Don said, ‘all seemed to be forgiven as we were observed to be correctly saluting—until it was realised that the flag had been replaced by a WAAF’s bloomers.’ The Australians were confined to barracks for twenty-four hours—a punishment they soon circumvented by removing palings from the back fence.
While at flying training school in Aylmer, Ontario, Don and a mate took leave on weekends and crossed the border to the United States. On one such visit to Detroit, an elderly couple in a limousine offered them a lift that took them straight past their hotel to a mansion. The couple told their maid to prepare baths and ready separate rooms for them. After dinner they were taken to a night spot, where Don and his mate sat with their hosts while surreptitiously eyeing unattached women at other tables. ‘Imagine our change of mood when two sylph-like creatures arrived at our table, apparently phoned by the wife prior to leaving home. The night then became very enjoyable and continued right through the rest of the weekend.’ With a smile on his face, Don sailed for England in June 1943 and began yet more training in Brighton.
The Canadians had military protocols for all contingencies, not least sexual health. Jim Rowland discovered this first hand when he was sent to a Service Flying Training School at Souris, in Manitoba, in early 1943. He and his RAAF mates were paraded in a big shed for a venereal disease inspection, an event known as a ‘short-arm parade’. Jim was bemused.
We lined up in the hangar and the Warrant Officer Disciplinary, or WOD, handed over to the Canadian Medical Officer, who proceeded to address us in great detail on what was about to happen.
‘When the Dahctor approaches, you are to take oot your penis and grasp it firmly by the base. When he asks you, you are to stroke it firmly towards the tip.’
Came a bored Australian voice from the back: ‘How many times?’
If the Canadians didn’t find this amusing, the Australians often had just as much trouble figuring out the North American sense of humour: ‘There were times when we thought them a wee bit serious, whereas we and the Poms abused each other happily almost as soon as we met.’
Misunderstandings in communication were inevitable and, as Rollo Kingsford-Smith found, could lead to tricky situations. Arriving in San Diego in early April 1943, Rollo and his mate Alan McCormack went ashore and hailed a taxi.
McCormack, not thinking clearly, told
the cab driver, ‘Take us to the nearest pub.’ The Hispanic cabbie did not understand. He shrugged his shoulders with a ‘Huh’! Mac then explained we had been on that ship, pointing to the Mount Vernon, ‘for three weeks’. The driver straight away got the message and took us to the closest sailors’ brothel. It did not look too good when we got inside and deciding that thirst was stronger than sex we took another cab to downtown.
After a few quiet beers, they returned to the ship to resume their trip to England.
Young Australians suddenly finding themselves on the other side of the world had a lot of growing up—or cultural catching up—to do. Nineteen-year-old Bill McGowen, a clerk with the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney who had enlisted after his father wrote on his application, ‘Don’t procrastinate,’ was posted to the No. 1 Air Observers’ School Ontario, near Toronto. ‘We always stayed at the Royal York Hotel, known to the Air Force as the only brothel in the world with eight lifts. We were so innocent then that if a girl or girls knocked on the door of our bedroom, we answered like stunned mullets. They usually went away laughing,’ he recalled.
On leave in Washington D.C., Bill and a mate were offered a lift by two women cruising around in a Packard coupe. ‘One was an artist and took us up to her studio for drinks. After that to dinner at a restaurant, a dinner they paid for, and then to the other girl’s home. They were married with husbands overseas and I could kick myself now to think we didn’t know what they wanted.’
